Our Agenda, Our Weakness

Here at Touchstone we have deliberately chosen to forego a detailed
theological and ecclesiological agenda. This admittedly is a source of frustration
to some, but it is a necessary frustration, for we dare not allow our agenda
to hamper or derail a process of reconciliation that is (we believe) a work
of the Holy Spirit.

We Christians are not the owners of the Church, and neither are the pope nor
the ecumenical patriarch nor their various Protestant (non-)equivalents. Those
of us at Touchstone—and all who share a desire for unity in truth—are
the unworthy servants of the Lord, who could, like the apostles, easily become
stumbling blocks to our Lord’s purposes.

Who of us, indeed, can claim to have escaped the blindness and hardness of
heart that for so many years plagued even our Lord’s chosen disciples?
There is only one appropriate starting place for our efforts. That is with deep
and genuine personal repentance. And this to some extent excludes the tendency
toward a self-assured agenda that has been so typical of “traditional”
Christians. Removing beams from one’s own eyes is an appropriate exercise—and
perhaps a lengthy one as well—to prepare one to be charitable to his brothers.

But the resulting ecclesiastical modesty should not be confused with a vague
sentimentalism. Our desire must go much deeper than a mere longing for Christians
to put their “silly” differences aside and simply get along with
each other. Alongside repentance there must be a deeply held conviction that
things in the Church are not as they should be. Do we believe that the divisions
in the Church grieve our Lord? How deep are the wounds? Have we become insensitive
to the pain?

None of the churches is the picture of health and stability, and very often
we ignore our own church’s weaknesses by enumerating others’ problems.
But regardless of how deep one’s conviction may be that his own church
is theologically correct, there should be an equally strong conviction that
there are those beyond one’s own doors who love our Lord and are loved
by him, misinformed though they may be (in our perceptions). We cannot ignore
them. They are our estranged relations. Though they may have separated from
us for good reasons or bad, if we refuse to include them in our concerns we
are cutting ourselves off from our own. This does not seem to be pleasing to
our Lord.

Even without a well-developed agenda, however, there is much work that can
be done. We can begin by removing the obvious barriers that are so often encountered:

• We must refuse to trivialize the differences that have split Christians
from each other. The details of the split between the Russian Orthodox
Church and the Old Believers, for example, may seem, to our eyes, to be based
on an obsession with certain fine points that are no longer of interest to us;
but we do not stand in the shoes of the Christians today who have suffered so
greatly at the hands of their own supposed co-religionists. We must recognize
the tremendous pain that has been caused on both sides in any given conflict,
and the many cultural, emotional, historical, as well as theological factors
that have entered in.

• We must refuse to bear false witness against other Christians.
We must refuse to accept the straw men, the misleading characterizations—either
positive or negative—that are bandied about with polemical intent.

• We must accept as our first priority the need to live a holy life.
The Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, for example, repeatedly requests a “life
of peace and repentance” from God’s mercy, and if more Christians
were actively seeking this, the cause of “unity in truth” would
make more substantial progress.

• We must seek to see the state of divided Christendom with a sober
realism, and at the same time be prepared to admit the limits of our own
wisdom. We know that there is One who walks among the twentieth-century “lampstands.”
His eyes, like blazing fire, accurately weigh and assess the state of each communion.
We who are more limited in our knowledge and fallible in our judgment must content
ourselves with a more modest assessment, but let it be as clear as it can be,
and, if it please God, may it rise on occasion to the level of prophetic insight.

• We must be willing to suffer. Perhaps it is not coincidental
that “Blessed are the peacemakers” is followed by “Blessed
are those who are persecuted.” Those who long for the unity of the Church
must be willing to be misunderstood—especially by members of their own
church—to be falsely accused, and to serve diligently but receive little
gratitude for their efforts.

Touchstone refuses to take shortcuts along the road to church unity.
We go on, “our own great weakness feeling,” as the hymn says, grieved
by the disunity that surely grieves our Lord, and unable and unwilling to pretend
that our hopes and dreams will be fulfilled short of a full and complete reunion
in truth. In this, the Cross of our Lord towers over us all. For it is surely
there, at the foot of the Cross, that our ecumenical efforts must begin: a place
where we see clearly that the work of saving and reuniting the Church is ultimately
God’s and not ours.

At the August 1996 “In the World” Conference, sponsored by Touchstone,
Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon in his presentation, “Safeguarding the Deposit,”
concluded with these words:

A major problem today is that Christians are not sufficiently finding their
places at the Cross. This has to do with prayer, and with fasting—that
is to say, with lifestyle. There is no way of keeping the deposit of the faith
without these. It has to be a question of lived experience, not just of hanging
on to certain ideas. Being steeped in the mystery of the Cross is a quiet
discipline of many years. . . . [Safeguarding] that deposit requires an absolute
commitment of our lives to the mystery of the Cross. To safeguard the deposit
necessarily means not belonging to the world, and not belonging to this world
is a description of the Cross. Amen.

—John Thompson, for the Editors

John Thompson is a librarian and professor at Waynesburg University, Waynesburg, Pennsylvania

“Our Agenda, Our Weakness,” first appeared in the Summer 1997 issue of Touchstone. If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue.

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